WHAT WE DISLIKED:

Introduction

It hasn’t been a long time since the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 660 Ti, a graphics card which managed to impress us immensely, packing some serious horsepower into a small frame, and carrying a rather nice price tag that shamed the GTX 670. To date, nothing in Nvidia’s Kepler stable matched up against AMD’s mid-range Radeon 7870 and 7850 cards though, but that’s about to change with today’s launch of the GTX 660.

The GTX 660 is the latest in the Kepler family, designed to target the mid-range of the gaming GPU market, and while it shares a similar lineage as the 660 Ti, this new card is a bit handcuffed in performance by comparison, with lower specs but also a lower price tag as well. With cards running in the $230-$240 price range for the most part, this is cheaper than AMD’s 7870, so it will be interesting to see how the competitors stack up.

One of the cards we’re looking at today is the Gigabyte GTX 660 Windforce, a mid-range gaming card that sports the cooler of the same name. We’ve seen this cooler on other cards models, most recently on the GTX 660 Ti by Gigabyte, and we came away suitably impressed at the low temperatures and noise levels.

Can Nvidia continue the Kepler onslaught into the mid-range? Can Gigabyte’s card stand out in the pack? Can it beat the competing Radeon cards? Let’s dive in and answer those questions and more.

Actually, the latest drivers are always used for our tests. On occasion, we have to use Beta drivers since the cards aren’t officially launched and therefore not supported by current “publicly available” drivers. In those instances, however, we receive drivers directly from Nvidia for testing. We don’t use old drivers, nor can we use future drivers that may have optimization tweaks; we can only use the most current ones available at the time of review.